THE SPECTRUM
ENERGY & ENVIRONMENT
Loss and Damage in the Global South: The struggle for support and climate justice on the international stage by
Andrew King
The impacts of climate breakdown are intensifying and becoming more frequent year on year. Even if global warming is limited to below 2°C in line with climate goals, the unabating, destructive activity of the past three decades, principally by industrialised nations, has ensured that the impacts of climate change are locked in for years to come. The world’s least developed countries (LDCs) are highly vulnerable to climate breakdown. LDCs typically have lower levels of resilience to climate impacts due to stronger reliance on climate-dependent industry and eco-system services, lack of disaster preparedness and prevailing socio-economic and geographic factors. Consequently, by 2050, LDCs will suffer from increased economic impacts due to climate-induced events of up to 50 per cent more GDP loss in a world with 3°C warming as compared to a 1.5°C world.1 Many of the impacts felt by vulnerable communities are not fully addressed by current mitigation and adaptation strategies, and a “protection gap” prevails in LDCs between current levels of resilience and that needed to ensure safety from the impacts of climate breakdown. This results in climate-induced impacts and risks, widely referred to as loss and damage.23 As the impacts of climate breakdown accelerate and intensify, LDCs will increasingly lack the finance, resources and coping
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capacity required to ensure both sustainable development and climate resilience. If left without international support, LDCs will suffer from increased internal displacement and migration, stranded assets, political instability, social unrest and conflict. It is estimated that international financial support amounting to $50b in 2022 and $300b by 2030 is required to support the direct economic losses of climate-induced loss and damage in LDCs, not taking into account non-economic and indirect economic losses.4 Furthermore, the group of 46 countries classified as LDCs are responsible for less than 0.4% of the world’s total historic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.5 As such, international support for loss and damage is intrinsically linked with justice and ethical considerations, due to the unequal distribution of historical and current GHG emissions, and the disproportionately high risk to climate breakdown and climate-induced loss and damage facing LDCs.6 Yet, despite the call for developed countries to increase climate finance, net official development assistance (ODA) flows declined by 2.7% in real terms between 2017 and 2018, with LDCs and Africa most affected by a decline in bilateral ODA.7 In particular, the UK, host of both the 26th Conference of the Parties (COP26) UN Climate Change negotiations in Novem-
